darktable styles and presets - mini tutorial

I've been using darktable for 4 years now as my primary editor. However, with any complex product there will be features you overlook - maybe because you didn't understand what they were when you first encountered them, or just had no need to learn about them at the time.

One such basic feature for me in dT is "styles".

What are styles and how to you use them?

In a nutshell, styles are a library of stored and named image processing histories. They are used to apply a saved image processing history to one or more files at a click of a button.

Example:

Let's say you have a standard processing routine (or perhaps several alternatives) that you tend to apply to your images. You probably give each image custom processing, but over time you notice that there are bunch of standard things you nearly always do to each image. The fundamentals of your standard processing is similar for many images. Repeating these steps over and over for every image is wearing out your mouse and your arm.

Never fear, there is a solution.

1. Find a typical unedited image in your catalogue.

2. Apply the routine basic processing steps you usually use in the darkroom tab. Don't apply any fancy custom edits, just the basics.

3. Finish your edits and switch to the Lighttable tab. Click on the image you just edited (make sure it is just this image!).

4. In the right hand side panel, find the section called "Styles".

5. Click the "create" button. A pop up will appear, with a long list of all the processing modules currently applied to your selected exemplar image. Next to each module name is a tick mark. Untick any modules you don't want to be in your new Style. Give the style a unique name eg "My default edits style Option 1" and click the save button.

6. You'll now notice there is a new style saved in the styles panel with the name you just gave it (it may be the only style in the panel).

Using the new style

To use the style, select one or more images in the Lighttable tab. Then in the styles panel on the right side of the Lighttable tab, click on your newly minted style name. Then click the "apply" button at the bottom of the panel. The processing steps in your style will be applied to each of the selected files in turn with just the one click.

You can then go and edit each file and add any custom edits to individual files.

I've created styles for B&W, B&W with heavy grain and a default style, just to get me started and save on a bunch of clicks.

Styles are quite like copying the processing history stack from one file and pasting to another. Except the style gets saved to a permanent library rather than disappearing when you close the program. A convenience/time saving feature, basically.

Difference between styles and presets

In darktable, a preset is a saved set of settings for one processing module. You can create as many presets as you want within a module and apply one to an image by selecting it from the hamburger menu to the right of the module name. Many modules come with pre-installed presets provided by the devs. Especially for some of the complex and hard to understand modules. Often one of these presets will be all you need.

Preset example:

The sharpen module has 3 sliders for radius amount and threshold. You can twiddle these sliders to tweak and refine the sharpening applied to an image. But often you don't need infinite flexibility, just a quick and dirty solution. You can add this to the module, by opening an image for editing, opening the sharpen module, tweak the sliders, then click the module hamburger icon and click "save as new preset" and give the preset a name.

Ever after, when you use the sharpen module, that preset will be waiting for you on the hamburger menu.

You could create several presets called, say, low, standard, high. Then you can apply differing amounts of sharpening by clicking an appropriate preset and save a bit of slider sliding. Adds up in the long run.

Presets are stored commands, but each preset contains only the settings for that processing module.

Styles are stored histories. They remember all the processing options across any number of processing modules, not just one. Use presets to quickly apply a standard processing in one module; use styles to quickly apply a whole collection of processing from many modules.

That's the differences between the two features.

Doesn't Darktable have a user created styles database too? I seem to recall there being one linked in the Wiki at one point.

Edit: It's linked on their site. I've never tried them though.
www.darktable.org/resources/

I don't know. I'll have a look around, see if I can find something. You can certainly get plenty of user provided LUTs, so I don't see why there wouldn't be.

So there are, not seen that before. The styles section in dt has "import" and "export" buttons. I didn't take any notice of these, I guess I now know what they are for!.

The official page has 4 standardised sample preview images for each style so you can see what they do, but you can't see the style settings. I guess you just have to install it and see what happens.

That page appears to be offering pre-canned "looks" styles you can apply with a click.

I think on balance, I'd rather stick to using the feature as a productivity aid, unless there is something outstandingly special in that library.

Thanks for the tip, though, there is always more to darktable than you think 👍

There a few users on pixls.us that created some as well. Some posted on Github. Those on Github may have the settings that were modified. There was a quite popular one to try and mimic the Fuji film simulations.

But like you I prefer doing my own thing.

Film sims seem well served via Luts. I have some installed for the Fuji range.

I can't say I consider these attempts at emulating films really capture what a film does - Velvia in particular. To me Velvia is all about the way it captures colours, especially magentas, blues during sunrise/set conditions. Emulations really just seem to boost saturation and contrast without addressing the colour response.

The main use I'm finding for the Provia LUT is as an alternative to Filmic RGB/Sigmoid. I import photos with the tone mapping modules disabled and use the Provia LUT (as part of my default style), usually with opacity reduced (else the contrast is often absurd) to do the tone mapping. Under the right lighting the LUT provides a single click starting point I find quite effective. When it doesn't work, I disable it and either invoke Filmic or just do it myself with curves and the contrast/shadows/midtones/highlights sliders in Colour Balance RGB.

dt provides a million ways to do anything 😁

I think you're thinking of dtstyle.net/

I have created a set of styles emulating the various film simulations in my cameras. The styles were created with the built-in darktable-chart and use the color-lookup-table module instead of LUTs, which I find works a bit more robustly.

And then I added a little film simulation panel to both the lighttable and the darkroom for quickly applying these styles, and a few other common edits:

It's just a feeling I have, no science to back it up, but I sense that film stocks are much more difficult to emulate than just setting up some contrast and colour shifts. Film stock doesn't not behave in a simple linear fashion, you get different looks at different exposures and under different lighting. To fully emulate a film stock so that you get convincing results would require lots of complicated changes in the emulation for different conditions. I might be wrong, but I feel film emulations are really just fancy ways of applying different raw profiles. As such, they don't really behave much like real film. Am I wrong?

Note that these icons refer to Fuji/Ricoh picture profiles, not film stocks. They replicate the JPEG renderings of these cameras. Ostensibly, they are inspired by film, but they don't physically simulate it.

For a realistic film simulation, you'd need to fix the ISO and white balance, simulate developer diffusion, halation, and grain. I have no idea if that's even realistically possible with digital color arrays and saturation behavior. I do know, however, that you can get quite close, albeit not necessarily with typical raw development tools, which aren't ideal for diffusion and halation. Filmulator has a diffusion simulation, I think, and it looks very good.

Perhaps somewhat off topic David, but I’ve found limited use-for/ effectiveness-of styles over the years. I’ve tried quite a number created by others & almost always been underwhelmed by the results (though not always).

Agreed, we all tend to use common editing patterns & those can be captured in styles. That said, styles capture both qualitative (ie, which parameter, such as saturation) & quantitative (ie, parameter values). In my experience, the parameter values vary enough from image to image that I rarely get an efficiency or consistency gain (because of the need to tweak the parameter values). In the cases where I have multiple exposures of a given subject, I’ve found it simpler to just copy/ paste the image settings.

Your thoughts regarding?
Cheers!
Jerry

I've been playing with DIY styles that contain a minimum set of settings. There are some standard things I always do and it wears my mouse hand out applying all the settings to every file. It's taken a bit of experimentation to work which settings can safely form the backbone of preliminary processing and which have to be adjusted on a frame by frame basis. The result has been good - a reduction in about 75% of repetitive clicking. I find it useful if I'm editing a batch of say 50-100 images, really speeds things up. My default style has 10 module settings in it. That's 10 less clicks in each file.

Interesting. So which settings/ parameters are the 10 that appear in your standard style?

LUT 3D
Crop
Local contrast
Sharpen
Contrast equalizer
Denoise (profiled)
Haze removal
Diffuse and sharpen
Raw chromatic aberrations
Chromatic aberrations

Thanks David!
Also interesting. Glad it works for you. For me, I could see a few of those have pretty standard values that I might not tweak image-to-image (CA comes to mind). But, in my experience, most of those need somewhat different values on image-by-image basis. Perhaps our difference comes down to subject matter? … with your subject matter needing less variation in setting values? Dunno. Anyway - appreciated your thoughts: makes me re-think this styles thing again.
Cheers!
Jerry

These are just defaults to get me started, obviously if I need to adjust something that's an extra step. But I find it gets me halfway started and reduces the workload with large batches of images. Still takes a long time, though!

I am working on mainly square crops at the moment and darktable doesn't seem to respect the in-camera crops.

The CA adjustments are needed because I'm using a few lenses that are unsupported by lensfun, so I have to do manual CA correction. The defaults seem as good as any custom settings.

For the tone mapping stage, I'm mostly using a Provia simulation LUT so I don't need sigmoid or filmic, the LUT does most of the work.

All the others are one form of sharpening or another. I'm trying to train myself to move away from an unhealthy fascination with crispy looking photos. I'm using a light touch mix of these modules to replace massive amounts of USM. This combo seems to work for me for most photos, and is a lot gentler than my old sharpening.

👍🏻 Thanks for your thoughts David - appreciated.
Cheers!
Jerry